I remember vividly the years before the Internet, when hunting down and obtaining obscure – or not so obscure, but in the eyes of the distributors very obscure – recordings, was a matter of extreme persistence and stubbornness, paired with the outmost patience and humility. I had this address book for distributors and record companies that I kept adding new entries to, and I always had a vivid correspondence going on. I was always sending cash in envelopes to strange places, and receiving packages with from around the globe. Getting checks from the bank to send was too expensive, but in those years of sending out cash I never once got busted!

Anyhow, in Sweden I came upon one distributor, Euroton, with the extremely friendly and service minded owner Eva Junegren, who always fulfilled my wishes. Euroton in those days distributed a lot of interesting labels, amongst which was the INA – GRM label. In fact, it was INA – GRM who pointed me towards Euroton. I had heard a couple of works by Bernard Parmegiani and François Bayle – long works (“Le Création du Monde” and “Les Couleurs de la Nuit”) – on the Swedish radio, and was spellbound! When I found out about the distributor I was happier than I’d been for a good many years. Later on that distributor dropped the GRM, or was dropped by them, but in the meantime I started getting the stuff directly from the GRM, which worked just fine.

At about the same time I started receiving the magazine Ostinato from the CDMC – Centre de la Musique Contemporaine in France. This provided me with a lot of record numbers etcetera, that I could start working with, and soon my collection of electroacoustics, preferably of French origin, grew considerably. I was completely alone in this endeavor, since nobody I knew could understand anything at all about this music, or why I was so enthusiastic about it.

During those early (for me!) years of trying to obtain electroacoustic music – which absolutely could not be found in any music store in Sweden – I came upon a work by Jacques Lejeune on the GMVL-label (Groupe Musiques Vivantes Lyon), called “Messe aux Oiseaux”. This wonderful CD was my first contact with Jacques Lejeune, and with a start like that I naturally tried to find more recordings by him, which I also did. Since my love for this music was so great, I also started to write to the composers themselves. I addressed a letter to Mr. Lejeune at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, and soon received a letter from the composer with a lot of valuable information. He also some years later (1992) sent me a cassette with a couple of new works by him, not yet released. One of the works was “Pour entrer et sortir d’un conte”, now released on this CD from INA – GRM.

Electroacoustics to me is like abstract paintings, and that is what I tell people who question my sanity when they hear what I want to play to them. Can they accept abstract art, or does it have to be figurative, naturalistic? Most people tend to accept abstract art, and comparing electroacoustics with nonfigurative painting tends to ease the tension a bit when I insist on demonstrating some electroacoustic piece for somebody.

Jacques Lejeune has himself in this case turned his pieces into some kind of programmatic works; not just by naming them the way he has, which of course plants certain associations in the mind of the listener, but also by defining certain elements or “scenes”, pertaining to both these pieces, as they’re parts of a bigger work called “Les Contes de la forêt profonde” (“Two Tales from the Deep Forest”). This is how he describes the procession of events:

“The Person and the Everyday Landscape – The Fabulous (Tales from the deep forest – Dream of running water – Ancient legends and extended myths) – Ritual and Imagery of the Sacred (Masses and Prayers – Oratorios and Laments – The Lovers, death and angels) – Birds of Fantasy – Jokes (The Bestiary – Greed and eroticism – Burlesques) – Variations (Studies and paraphrases – Pieces inspired by metamorphosis)”

However, I prefer just to listen, letting my mind browse freely in and out of these halls of mirrors, these sometimes gruesome landscapes with wooden floors and distant horizons. There is an atmosphere of Salvador Dali in this music, a melting clock on a rock and the twinkle of an eye – what is real? “Well, what is?” as Bob Dylan mockingly replies when the bewildered Mr. Jones desperately tries to sort his life out in “Ballad of a Thin Man”.

As with nonfigurative art, the electroacoustic art is a play on the subconscious. These tonal abstractions might call up any number of violently suppressed shapes out of murky corners of the mind, usually hidden from view, like riddles told to us by ourselves in our dreams, sometimes leaving an impression, a certain taste, the whole following day. This music is much about dreamscapes, about visions, about whatever it might hook on to and drag out of the subconscious, into full view, but always in disguise. As with the riddle of your dreams, it is up to you, the listener, the watcher, the experiencer, to make some sort of sense of it all. This makes electroacoustics a very personal thing indeed.

I see the Lejeune CD being pulled into the CD player. The music starts… dark movements, back and forth, like a restless captive wrestling to get free from who knows what fate… light streaks of piercing sounds cuts across the darkness… birds call… a meadow in a magic forest opens in the gloomy light, softened by the mist… water… there’s a stream somewhere ahead… a distortion of vision, a distortion of sound, barely perceptible, marks the transition from this to that, from this world to another, from worldliness to unworldliness, in an instant, the way death comes, the way love comes… and the passing of something leads to a foreign state of mind… a sudden heavy sound, a close call… and you hear the clocks now, melting, transient… but suddenly something bounces like the release of springs; oh yeah, the mushrooms, the mushrooms, popping up everywhere…

…and that’s just the beginning of the tale…